100% Satisfaction Guaranteed.

Pages

Our kindergarteners are some of our biggest makers at Lighthouse. They make year-round, usually with sewing and woodworking (using handsaws, clamps, drills, and hammers). Now, they are in their second week of testing out a programming unit, and so far it looks like it’s going pretty well.

The tool (toy?) they’re using is called a Pro-Bot, and our students are experimenting programming their Pro-Bots to move in specific patterns. You can actually stick a marker into the Pro-Bot, making it draw as it moves—and maybe our kinder classes will build up to that—but here’s what I’ve seen them trying so far:

1. Working in groups of two, students designed “roads,” keeping their turns at right-angles.

Codecraft Lab, a 501(c)3 public charity in Brevard County, FL, began working this school year with local public schools to create after-school clubs that teach students how to create with computer coding while focusing on student expression and creativity. Codecraft Lab currently works with three schools to offer 118 students in grades three through six the opportunity to learn to code using Scratch, an object-oriented, drag-and-drop, cloud-based programming tool designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (http://scratch.mit.edu/about/). Scratch is designed specifically for children ages 8-16 and is used worldwide. Children create and program their own interactive stories, games and animations and also work collaboratively on team projects.

Frankly, I don’t know what our official title for this project is. Around the Creativity Lab, we generally just refer to it as “the hand project,” or “hands,” as in: “Students are working on their hands,” or, “Do we have any hands we can show off to a tour group?” So, here it is:

In the weeks to come, we are focusing on Maker Faire prep, but I’m also working on an updated project guide for scribble machines.

It would be nice if I could fit this project guide to the template I just created for Turtle Art, but we’re talking about two very different kinds of projects. The Turtle Art project guide is designed to teach a specific curriculum over a series of lessons, while scribble machines are more of an exercise in creative design and observation. So I’ve been playing with different ways to structure this guide, which has led me to experiment with expanding the project, itself.

One of the difficulties of translating the school makerspace experience for people who are not currently engaged in maker projects with us, is that most of the work we do with students in the makerspace takes place over many days, weeks, or months. However, as is often the case when you are working in an area that generates great interest, it is necessary to find a way to boil down the experience to fit into a more limited timeframe. When my colleagues and I were asked to create a STEAM/maker experience that can be completed in two hours we were skeptical that we could design an experience that honored our principles of creating Agency, Audience, and Authenticity, while fitting within the time constraint. Ultimately we focused on crafting an experience that encouraged significant participant agency, constrained audience to the fellow participants, and hoped that this would be enough to create an experience that felt authentic.

The Making Learning Connected Massive Open Online Collaboration (CLMOOC) summer professional learning is comprised not of units or weekly topics. Instead, the collaborative professional learning is organized into "make cycles" which invite participants to make artifacts or content in an effort to explore Connected Learning principles by embodying them. Make cycles are lead by intrepid teams from National Writing Project sites or Educator Innovator partners.

This resource supports make cycle leaders in preparing to lead these cycles, detailing the explicit tasks they'll need to complete, and describing the help they'll receive. The graphic below lists the tasks which correspond with the content of this resource.

Brianna Crowley is a Pennsylvania high school teacher who encourages her students to use social media tools to express themselves and expand agency in the classroom. She also asks her students to use these platforms to teach each other about a range of topics and to build a sense of connectedness and community. Before approaching her teaching, she asks students what they have to teach her.

We started a STEAM program, and three years later, we’ve outgrown the acronym.

It began when a group of upper school students approached a physics teacher about creating an advanced physics group tutorial. The physics teacher recruited a computer science teacher and the tutorial became robotics. The computer science teacher enlisted the support of a media and design teacher and the program became STEAM. By the time September arrived, our students, teachers, and school began a three year trajectory we did not anticipate.

Start with design: The hated classroom chair. We asked students to redesign them. They did. They couldn’t stop. They redesigned the classroom. Then they redesigned the school.

In November 2009, I had the honor and privilege of speaking to a group of NWP leaders, teachers, consultants, and friends at a convening for the NWP's DIGITAL IS initiative. This collection features the presentation itself along with a selection of related resources.

The Digital Is website hosts a growing collection of stories, reflections, and resources about teaching and learning writing in a digital age. As the collection grows, we hope to maintain a certain point of view about teaching and the practice of writing: heavy on reflection, open to inquiry, focused on authentic student accomplishment.

What does it mean to teach digital writing? Not in general, but in specific: specific teachers, specific students, specific opportunities. In this collection we invite you to look at a sampler of what 'digital' is in five classrooms.

This collection highlights three of the many excellent resources tagged voice and audience on the Digital Is website. Important elements of the digital classroom—inquiry, emerging experts, and a pedagogy of collegiality—are clearly themes in the work of these classrooms.

At its core, connective writing is the idea that digital writers using digital writing tools create an inherently different kind of writing. What is connective writing, and what might it look like in practice? Is it new and different?...or simply an extension of what's come before?

The Internet is our writing space par excellence, whether we access it via our smartphones, through a Web browser, or using an email application. Here, we delve into a complex narrative of how this space was imagined, designed, and crafted, surfacing important developments worth thinking about.

The typical kindergarten classroom is a cacophony of voices matched by the constant motion of little bodies. Every square inch of space offers opportunities for kids to construct, create, talk, share, and use their hands. Where in this picture is the time and space for technology?

Jenkins, et al. (2007) characterize today's society as one based on participation, using the term "participatory culture" to describe how we are no longer pure consumers of media, but producers, sharers, and collaborators.

The prevalence of new multimedia authoring tools has redefined the kinds of writing students can compose in our classrooms. This collection supports students in composing with and using new digital writing tools in purposeful manners.

Youth are communicating with each other and the larger society today using a variety of digital and social media tools, but what are they saying? What possibilities do these digital tools hold for social, political, and economic change?

Even the unstoppable momentum of 21st century literacy has not managed to completely debunk the myth of solitary genius, and the tension between solitary authorship and collaboration remains. In this collection, new voices dialogue in asking how individual perspective should be treated when it exists due to its role in a much larger, ongoing, public conversation.

The magnitude of the change in our core communications and media culture prompts speculation about the impact of that change on us as human beings. This collection gathers some of this speculation as various voices ask: Is it the end of the world as we know it? (By the way, I feel fine.)

Pages

About the National Writing Project

The National Writing Project focuses the knowledge, expertise, and leadership of our nation's educators on sustained efforts to improve writing and learning for all learners. The NWP envisions a future where every person is an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active participant in a digital, interconnected world.